Alma AP01 - RCA - June 14, 2016

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on June 14, 2016

The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma AP01 instance at the APAC Data Center during the following hours: 

June 14, 2015 from 11:00 PM until 11:11 PM Singapore TimeZone

During the event, the service was unavailable for the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

Following a Human error the June HotFix was not applied on the environment.

Any version update is applied in two steps, the first step is a preparation step which is executed a few days prior to the maintenance window. The second step is the actual install which is executed during the maintenance window.

The Human error was that the first step was not applied on AP01 production and there for the second step did not install the HotFix.

Ex Libris had performed an urgent unplanned maintenance activity of applying the HotFix that included system unavailability.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

• Procedure was updated to prevent this from happening by adding two checkpoints
  1. Manually verifying first step was executed before excuting the second step
  2. Manually checking the environment's version number after second step has been executed.

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/